The Correlation of the Mayan and Julian/Gregorian Calendars

by Linda Schele
(with minor editing by Ivan Van Laningham)

The following was sent to Milo Gardner on May 6 1994 as e-mail because I had not
yet figured out how to reply to AZTLAN. For those who are interested, here
is the reply to his question about the correlation and
Floyd Lounsbury’s 1.5.5.0 number.

First of all, you must understand I am not a number person. I am a good
friend of Floyd’s and have watched him argue the correlation problem with
David Kelley for 25 years. Floyd did not send me a preprint copy of his
correlation paper because he knows I am not a number person, and the “Sky in
Mayan Literature” was not available until very late 1992, when the
manuscript for “Maya Cosmos” was going through its final editing process
before going to Morrow for production. If you have published books, you
know that any changes made after the stage of copy editing causes apoplexy
in harried editors.

But I probably would not have cited Floyd’s article anyway, because
I was not attempting to make an argument about the correlation—only stating
that David Freidel and I would be using the 285 correlation instead of the
283. Moreover, “Maya Cosmos” was written for the general public first and
professionals secondarily. In my experience, there are people who think in
numbers and who love them. For this kind of mentality (which Floyd and Dave
Kelley have and I patently do NOT—this is a big joke between us), the
Dresdon Codex, the eclipse tables, and other such things are the best way of
entering Maya studies. But for most people, the numbers are opaque and mind
numbing. For instance, I took Floyd’s seminar on glyphs in 1974-1975. He
taught us the Venus tables and the eclipse tables. I was supposed to have
learned from the master. All of his lessons fell on deaf ears. I could not
reproduce any of it and understood less. In the workshops here I describe
the experience as “it all made sense when I heard it, but when I walked out
the door, it dribbled out of my left ear.” It’s the “left ear” syndrome.

I finally learned how Venus works by taking EZCosmos 3 and adding
the appropriate intervals over hundreds of years and watching what
happened. I learned it through the geometry of the sky rather than the
numbers. Same thing for the eclipse tables. The rows of number that Floyd
put in this Encyclopedia of Science article were just that—rows of numbers.
I learned how the eclipse table worked by using the eclipse finder in
EZCosmos 4 to construct my own table for the Maya last summer in our Antigua
workshop. This semester I did the same sort of thing in our Dresden seminar
by using EZC 4’s eclipse finder to check the Dresden eclipse table against
the real world using all of its eligible base dates. After that, Floyd’s
numbers made sense to me.

At a conference here in Austin last November, Dennis Tedlock argued
with me about this. He argued that there are other hierophanies just as
good for the Venus pages as the ones Floyd Lounsbury presented. Dennis
assumed as many others have, that I prefer the 285 for the same reasons as
Floyd does. But you have to understand that I have never fully understood
Floyd’s reasons.

I have been convinced that the 584283-5 correlation was the correct
family because of the astronomical alignments we kept finding, but as Dave
Kelley says, the astronomy falls into regular periodicities that can be used
to support many different correlations—as they have been for a hundred
years. Dave doesn’t even believe that the 584283 family is correct; for me
the problem has been to chose between the 283 or 285. In general, the
astronomy does not help because almost all of the known events have a one or
two day or greater fudge factor in them. You cannot use them to select
between the one or the other.

Dave Kelley gave me what I consider to be the critical clue twenty
years ago. The eclipse table of the Dresden Codex lists a 13 Ahaw that falls
on 9.17.0.0.0 13 Ahaw 18 Kumk’u if the initial 12 Lamat base date is used.
In the Dresden sequence, this marks 9.17.0.0.0 as a new moon with an eclipse
station. More over, the same augury that appears in the Dresden Codex also
occurs on Quirigua E east side as the age of the moon in the lunar series. I
take this to identify 9.17.0.0.0 both in the retrospective chronology of the
Dresden and in the real time chronology of the Classic period as an eclipse
station and a new moon.

584285 answers this limitation. It was a new moon and an eclipse
eliglible date. There was no visible eclipse on that day at Quirigua,
although there was one of about 20% at Tikal. However, there was a 94%
umbral lunar eclipse on Feburary 4, 771 fifteen days after 9.17.0.0.0. That
alone would have confirmed the correctness of the identification.
9.17.0.0.15 was a lunar eclipse and the next day is marked at Copan as the
heliacal rising of the Eveningstar. 584283 puts 9.17.0.0.0 on Jan. 18, 771,
which was not an eclipse date. Moreover, as I found out last summer in
constructing a modern eclipse table with the Maya, 583283 does not place
July 11, 1991 on an eclipse station and 584285 does. This was the date of
the total eclipse over Guatemala City.

Finally, I have not read the two other sources you cite. However, I
am confused by your reference to a fourth calendar. Do you mean fourth
codex? I do not accept that there were many different calendars running at
the same time as some people have proposed. We have a difference in the year
bearers between the Dresden, the Yucatecan, and the highland calendars,
that resulted in a slippage of the interlocking of the tzolkin and
haab—that is, on which set of days 1 Pop would fall. Justeson has suggested
a slip of one month in the epi-Olmec calendar, but so far I see no evidence
that they are counting from different bases.

Kelley, David H.,
“Eurasian Evidence and the Mayan Calendar
Correlation Problem,” in Hammond, Norman, ed.,
Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches: Proceedings of a Symposium on Mesoamerican Archaeology Held by the University of Cambridge Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1974.

Lounsbury, F. G.,
“The Base of the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, and
Its Significance for the Calendar-Correlation Problem,”
Maya File 123, Maya File 316h.